Dying to Sin

31

Martin Rourke was one of the least attractive men Fry had ever seen, and that was saying something. His head was badly shaved, leaving a short, patchy fuzz all over his skull, like an old tennis ball that had been chewed by the dog.

‘But I know nothing about those women,’ he said.

‘We have evidence that you knew them, Mr Rourke. You can’t deny it.’

‘I don’t mean that. I’m not trying to deny that I knew them. Of course, they were around a lot. But I don’t know what happened to them. I had nothing to do with that. As far as I was concerned, they just disappeared.’

‘We’ll see what the Crown Prosecution Service has to say. If they think there’s enough evidence, you’ll be charged with two murders.’

‘That won’t happen. It can’t.’

Rourke stared at her, his face suggesting that he might have said the wrong thing already.

‘What was the involvement of the Sutton brothers in your operation?’

‘The two old guys? We kept them out of the way as much as possible. Tom Farnham had them under his influence well enough. He could twist them round his little finger, could Farnham. He’d got himself well in there, all neat and tidy.’

‘Were you laundering red diesel at any point during this time?’

‘No. That was what we told the old guys,’ said Rourke. ‘They never questioned it, the idiots. Well, why should they? They were already implicated, because they’d used it themselves as a way of saving money. They were guilty before I ever got to work on them. In fact, Tom Farnham got a guy he knew to process a few gallons for them to use, so they’d have no trouble persuading themselves to believe it. But the bottom had gone out of the diesel business by then. Farmers got too scared of the Excise.’

‘But why there? Why Pity Wood Farm?’

‘Farnham was the man who came up with the idea. And, I have to give him his due, Pity Wood was a perfect set-up for what we wanted. A remote farm, where no one would notice the smell. Lots of smells on a farm, eh? And plenty of empty sheds, plus space to bury the waste. Perfect. All we needed was labour. Well, labour that didn’t ask any questions. That was where Martin Rourke came in. It was my speciality. I had the contacts with people in the import business.’ He grinned. ‘Human imports, I mean. Obviously.’

‘Cheap imported labour.’

‘But so what? It’s only like getting your telly from China, or your clothes made in India. The whole world runs on cheap labour now. It’s a fact of twenty-first-century economics. The only difference is that people don’t care as long as they can’t see it happening. Sweat shops in Asia are fine, but let someone like me employ a few economic migrants and the law comes down on me like a ton of bricks.’

‘I think the correct term would be illegal immigrant.’

‘Whatever. It’s the same, no matter what you call them. But if it happens here, some entrepreneur like me taking advantage of cheap labour to run a going concern, then people get all outraged. What a scandal, they say. It’s practically slavery. All that sort of crap. But those workers live a lot better here than they do in Bangladesh, you know.’

‘Or Slovakia.’

‘Slovakia?’

‘Don’t you remember a woman called Nadezda Halak? She was from Slovakia.’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t remember their names, for heaven’s sake. They got their wages in cash, and we provided accommodation, but that’s as far as our obligations went. They didn’t stay around for long, any of them. They’d get a toe-hold in this country, or in the UK, and off they’d go to work in a sandwich factory or something. We were providing a service, really. The government ought to have been giving us a grant.’

‘You were using these people to manufacture illegal drugs, at great risk to themselves,’ pointed out Fry. ‘There’s no way you can even attempt to justify that.’

‘We all take risks in life,’ said Rourke. ‘If we think it’s worth it. Don’t you take risks, in your job?’

‘The difference,’ said Fry, ‘is that I know what risks I’m taking.’

With the tapes turning slowly, Raymond Sutton talked. He didn’t appear to be talking to Hitchens and Cooper, or even to the tape recorder, but to some voice inside his own head — a voice which seemed to be answering him at times.

‘When you’re young, you don’t think you’re ever going to die,’ he said. ‘But sometimes, when you’re old, it can’t come too soon.’

Cooper leaned towards Sutton. ‘Your brother, Derek — you remember we talked about his superstitions?’

‘Eh?’

‘Derek had some funny beliefs, didn’t he? You said he was a bit fey, like your mother.’

‘You never knew our mother.’

‘You told me, Mr Sutton. Remember?’

Cooper wanted to take hold of his arm and shake it until the old man remembered. Though he held himself under tight control, Sutton seemed to read the shadow of a threat in his face and flinched away.

‘All kinds of bad luck came along. But it was only to be expected. It was what I warned them all about.’

‘What do you mean?’

Sutton stared at him. ‘The bad luck. All those disasters. Derek said there would be bad luck when Billy left the farm. He said it had been known for generations. There was a terrible row when I chucked Billy out.’

‘You got rid of the skull?’

‘Yes. Damned thing. It was damning us all. I told Derek, it was an evil thing, and it had to go. The house was cursed, cursed by the Devil, and my brother was one of his dupes. It had to go.’

‘There must have been arguments.’

‘Arguments, aye. Blazing rows. Derek wouldn’t hear of it, and we stopped speaking of the thing altogether after a while. One night, when he was asleep, I took it out of the wall, and I smashed it up and I burned it in the incinerator, and I scraped out the ash and I drove out to Carsington Reservoir, and I tipped it in the water. And Billy was gone. For he that is dead is freed from sin.’

‘How did your brother respond when he found out?’

‘He was raving. He was never stable, Derek. Never followed God. He’d strayed off the path. God rest his soul, but he was a lost cause.’

‘We found traces of potassium nitrate in your kitchen — that’s saltpetre. And other ingredients used in a recipe for a Hand of Glory. Have you heard of it?’

‘Ah, he was always on with his messing. Meddling with things he knew nothing about. Tempting the Devil, I called it. I wouldn’t have none of it. I threw his stuff out if I found it, or chucked it down the sink. He started trying to hide things from me, but I smelled him out. The stink of evil is never forgotten.’

Cooper remembered the kitchen at Pity Wood Farm, the dripping sink and the unidentifiable jars in the fridge sitting next to the builders’ milk. There had certainly been a stink that he might never forget. Whether it was the stink of evil he supposed was open to interpretation.

‘I don’t know what you want,’ said Sutton, suddenly agitated. ‘What is it you want?’

‘Mr Sutton, it was the head, wasn’t it? It had nothing to do with a Hand of Glory. After you threw Billy out, your brother wanted a head.’

Sutton focused on him nervously, his eyes watering now, and Cooper thought he would lose him altogether in the next few moments.

‘I believe in what I believe. But Derek’s faith lay elsewhere. If you believe in something — really believe it — you’re prepared to take your belief to the extreme.’

‘What are you saying, sir?’

‘She was dead already. Dead as can be. Derek said it wouldn’t hurt her. The body is only the shell, when the soul has moved on to a better place.’

‘And so you dug her up and removed her head?’ said Hitchens, aghast. ‘I can’t believe it.’

‘No, no. Well, it was already … detached, more or less.’

Cooper recalled stories of riots at gallows sites, when the families of hanged criminals fought the anatomists’ men for corpses. People had different reasons for wanting possession of a body, or parts of it.

‘Derek said we needed another one,’ said the old man finally. ‘But he was wrong. It never worked, did it?’

And Cooper sat back, suddenly exhausted. He hadn’t realized how tense he’d been, the amount of nervous energy he’d been expending on willing the old man to speak, to stay aware for the amount of time he needed him to.

‘No, Mr Sutton,’ he said wearily. ‘It didn’t work.’

Raymond Sutton looked around the room, his eyes becoming vague as they met the light from the window. Tears glinted in his lashes and settled slowly on to his cheeks.

‘I want you to go away now,’ he said. ‘I want everyone to go away.’

Cooper caught himself shaking uncontrollably by the time he left the interview room. He couldn’t face the idea of crossing the car park from the custody suite and walking back up to the CID room to transcribe his notes, as if everything was perfectly normal. So he sat for a few minutes in his car instead.

He couldn’t conceal the fact that he’d found the interview with Raymond Sutton unbearably upsetting. But at least he knew why — and it wasn’t just some pathetic tendency to sympathize with the underdog, as Diane Fry would have suggested. Raymond Sutton’s rambling about his home being cursed had reminded him too strongly of his own mother at the height of her illness.

Specifically, it reminded him of one traumatic incident that had taken place just before the family had faced up to the fact that Isabel Cooper had deteriorated to the point where they could no longer keep her at home.

Above all, Cooper found that he was remembering the smell. It was as if it had seeped into his car silently and rapidly, like a lethal leak from his exhaust.

There had been a stink in the room worse than anything he had ever smelt on a farm. No cesspit, no slurry tank, no innards from a freshly gutted rabbit or pheasant had ever smelt as bad as the entirely human stench that filled the room. There was excrement daubed across the wallpaper, and on the bedclothes piled on the floor. A pool of urine was drying into a sticky pool on the carpet near to where similar puddles had been scrubbed clean with disinfectant, leaving pale patches like the remnantsof some virulent skin disease. A chair lay on the rug with one leg missing. A curtain had been torn off its rail, and the pages of books and magazines were scattered like dead leaves on every surface. A pink slipper sat ludicrously in a wooden fruit bowl on the chest of drawers, and a thin trickle of blood ran across the top drawer, splitting into two forks across the wooden handle. The drawers and the wardrobe had been emptied of their contents, which were heaped at random on the bed.

It was from beneath the heap of clothes that the noise came, monotonous and inhuman, a low, desperate wailing. When he moved towards the bed, the mound stirred and the keening turned to a fearful whimper. Cooper knew that the crisis was over, for now. But this had been the worst so far, no doubt about it. The evidence was all around him.

He leaned closer to a coat with an imitation fur collar, but was careful not to touch the bed, for fear of sparking off a violent reaction. The coat was drenched in a familiar scent that brought a painful lump to his throat. A white hand was visible briefly as it clutched for a sleeve and the edge of a skirt to pull them closer for concealment. The fingers withdrew again into the darkness like a crab retreating into its shell. The whimpering stopped.

‘It was the Devil,’ said a small voice from deep in the pile of clothes. ‘The Devil made me do it.’

The mingled odours of stale scent, sweat and excrement and urine made Cooper feel he was aboutto be sick. He swallowed and forced himself to keep his voice steady.

‘The Devil’s gone away. You can come out now, Mum. The Devil’s gone away.’

When Fry went back in to interview Martin Rourke for a second time, he’d been allowed to consult a lawyer. She was expecting a string of ‘no comments’, and a frustrating end to her trip to Dublin. But maybe things were different here.

‘Of course I remember her,’ said Rourke straight away. ‘I want to be honest with you.’

‘Remember who?’

‘Nadezda, the Slovak. She couldn’t resist trying out the crank herself. Stupid bitch. It made her careless. She was bound to kill herself sooner or later.’

‘Kill herself? You’re suggesting that Nadezda Halak died in an accident?’

‘That’s exactly what happened. It was accidental death, brought on by her own carelessness. That would be a factor, all right.’

Fry glanced at Lenaghan, who gave her a nod to go ahead.

‘Mr Rourke, tell us exactly what happened, in your own words.’

‘Well, there’s nothing much to tell. There was an explosion in the shed one day. None of us knew the chemicals were so dangerous. Nada had been standing closest to the equipment when it blew up.’

‘Nada is …?’

‘The woman you said. Halak. Nada is what we called her, for short.’

‘And she was killed by the explosion?’

‘Dead as you like. It was lucky she was the only one so near. There were other folk about, but they only got a few cuts, one or two acid burns. Nothing serious.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘Some of the workers started to panic, but Tom Farnham quietened them down. He said there was plenty of room on the farm to dispose of a body where no one would ever find it. And who would come looking for her? Like I said, those people move on all the time. They want to be untraceable.’

‘So you buried her on the farm?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the Sutton brothers didn’t object to this?’

Rourke snorted. ‘How could they? They’d done exactly the same thing themselves, three years before.’

Cooper had never felt so bad about questioning a witness. Though they’d achieved what they set out to do, there was no sense of satisfaction in getting Raymond Sutton to confirm what he suspected. It had been a knowledge that he didn’t really want to have to share, but now he couldn’t keep it to himself any longer.

In a way, he supposed he’d been hoping, deep down, that Sutton would deny it, that he’d be able to prove somehow that it had never happened. Well, it might have been better if he’d never asked. But then he would have had to live with the doubt. Cooper knew there had been no way of winning in this situation.

And there was certainly no way of achieving justice — not justice in the terms of the law, nor justice in any subjective sense. Even if Derek Sutton had still been alive, what would have been the point of punishing him? His brother was an accessory to the crime, of course. After the fact, if not before. No matter how contemptuous he’d been, no matter how many disapproving silences he’d indulged in over the kitchen table, Raymond had gone along with his brother’s superstitions, and had told no one about the skull.

Well, of course he hadn’t. Sharing a house with a crazy brother was one thing. Watching that brother get carted off to spend the rest of his life in a psychiatric institution while you were left to cope entirely on your own — that was a different thing altogether. The decision wouldn’t have been an easy one for most families, let alone the Suttons of Pity Wood Farm. In fact, there was no decision involved. Blood was blood, and you stood by your own. End of story.

Cooper finished his report and stood up. Yes, it would have been the end of the story. If only Raymond Sutton had died himself before the farm was dug up. That had been his plan, Cooper was sure.

But The Oaks had looked after him too well. Their care had prolonged his life longer than he’d expected. Physically, he was probably in better condition now than when he was looking after himself at home. So Raymond had sat in his room at The Oaks, watching the seasons change over the hills, while the sale of the farm went through, the paperwork was completed, and the builders moved in. From that moment, he must have been expecting every day to hear the news that something had been found. Each morning he must have looked for the newspapers to read the headlines, every evening he must have been the first in front of the TV for the start of East Midlands Today. And every day he must have lived in expectation of the footsteps in the hallway of his care home, the voices of strangers speaking his name.

When Raymond Sutton abandoned the farm and sold up immediately after the death of his brother, he hadn’t expected to live very long. A matter of days or weeks, perhaps. But then he’d done a terrible thing. He’d survived.

Raymond had thought he was tappy, just like his brother. Approaching his end, preparing to meet his maker. All those other euphemisms for dying. But in the end he’d lived too long to escape being called to account for his actions. How ironic that Raymond was also the only member of his family who expected to be punished for eternity.

To follow Christ means dying to sin. Raymond Sutton would die twice over.

Fry produced a series of evidence bags. They contained the items they’d found at the house in Bunratty Road, hidden behind the wardrobe in the bedroom of Martin Rourke’s daughter.

‘Was this the woman they buried four years ago?’ asked Fry. ‘Her name is Orla Doyle, an Irish national. Black hair. She would be thirty-two years old by now.’

‘I don’t know who she was,’ said Rourke.

He was starting to sweat now, Fry could see. He hadn’t felt guilty for the death of Nadezda Halak, but Orla Doyle was a name a bit closer to home.

‘You were too greedy, Mr Rourke,’ said Fry. ‘This is Orla Doyle’s passport, found in your house this morning, so you can’t try to tell us you had no connection with her. I suppose you realized from dealing with illegal immigrants that there was a lucrative market for passports? And not forged ones, either, but genuine passports, taken from dead people. Is there a premium on them in the human import business, Mr Rourke?’

‘I’m not answering that.’

‘In fact, it must be even better if the person involved is not only dead, but has never been reported missing.’

Rourke just shook his head. His face was closing up now, and she wouldn’t get much more from him. But she still had evidence to confront him with.

Fry help up a second bag. ‘This is a Slovakian passport, sir. Discovered in the same hiding place, behind your daughter’s wardrobe. Not as much call for a Slovak identity in Ireland, I suppose, even now? This one is for Nadezda Halak, from the city of Ko. sice. Nadezda would be twenty-four by now, if she was still alive. Would you like to see what’s actually left of her, sir? I can arrange for that to happen.’

Rourke shook his head, resorting to a silence that was no good for the tapes. Fry nodded at Lenaghan.

‘Interview suspended.’

Fry couldn’t wait to make the call to her DI and tell him that she’d not only established how Nadezda Halak died, but had also confirmed the identity of the second body at Pity Wood Farm. She was buzzing with satisfaction, and at the end of the conversation with Hitchens, she still felt she hadn’t talked enough, so she rang Ben Cooper and told her story all over again.

‘That’s brilliant, Diane,’ he said. ‘So the trip to Ireland was really worthwhile, after all.’

‘Yes, it was.’

Then Fry remembered it was Tuesday, the day she’d been afraid of being away from Edendale, and her excitement began to ebb away.

‘So what’s going on back home?’ she said cautiously.

‘Oh, the new superintendent has arrived.’

‘Making an impression, is she?’

‘You might say that. There’s no doubt who’s in charge. She’s already taking the credit.’

‘But she hasn’t done anything,’ said Fry. ‘She can’t have. Not yet.’

‘Maybe. It’s hard to tell what’s been going on behind the scenes.’

Fry sighed. ‘Has she done anything I need to know about?’

‘Put Gavin in his place with a firm hand.’

‘Oh, well …’

‘And Jack Elder is being released.’

‘Elder? He was my prisoner.’

‘Not after tomorrow,’ said Cooper. ‘He’ll be in court in the morning, then he’ll get bail and walk away.’

‘Damnation.’

‘The superintendent is right, though, Diane — we don’t have any evidence to connect Mr Elder with a serious offence. He’s not a credible murder suspect.’

‘No, but he’s a link,’ said Fry. ‘I’m sure of it.’

‘It’s a pity you’re not here to put your case to Branagh.’

‘Yes, isn’t it?’

‘It appears Orla Doyle is one of our missing persons,’ said Lenaghan when he’d escorted Rourke back to his cell. ‘What a result. You can come here again, Detective Sergeant Fry.’

‘Thank you. I think I can say it was a mutually satisfactory visit, Garda Lenaghan.’

‘Tony,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘You ought to call me Tony.’

Cooper got out the Toyota to drive into Sheffield, where he had an appointment with the forensic anthropologist, Dr Jamieson. A traffic officer he passed in the car park greeted him with a weather forecast.

‘Fog.’

‘That’s bad news.’

‘The roads are very busy, too. There’ll be fatalities before nightfall.’

And Cooper thought it could be worse than that. If they cancelled flights at Robin Hood Airport, Fry might not be getting back from Dublin. Not today, anyway.

As he drove to Sheffield, Cooper tried to get everything straight in his head. But whenever he thought about the story, it began to unravel, like a tapestry with a loose stitch. If he tugged at it in the wrong place, everything changed shape, the picture twisted and distorted, figures vanishing from the scene and others coming closer together.

After a few minutes, the picture was becoming awfully grey and murky, just like the weather, like the landscape behind that belt of December rain.

‘Oh, you were hoping to tie this skull in with Victim B?’ said Dr Jamieson, when Cooper found him in his laboratory at the university.

‘Well … yes, that was the assumption.’

‘An assumption, eh? I don’t believe in them myself. Do you find they achieve anything?’

‘Well, Doctor, it does seem a logical conclusion that this skull belonged to the woman we’ve found with a missing head. Particularly when they both came from the same property.’

‘I see,’ said Jamieson. ‘So where does the male victim come in?’

‘Male victim?’

‘The person the skull belongs to. Because this is definitely male. Look at the distinctive shape of the jaw, the size of the occipital dome. Somewhere, there’s a male victim who’s missing a head.’

‘So this is the real Screaming Billy, after all,’ said Cooper. ‘Despite what Raymond Sutton said. This is the ancient skull that has been in the wall of the farmhouse.’

‘Oh? What’s that?’

‘A local superstition, Doctor. A skull that protects the owners of the farm from bad luck. They call them screaming skulls.’

‘Interesting. And how long is the skull supposed to have been in the wall of the farmhouse?’

‘Centuries, according to local folklore.’

Dr Jamieson shook his head. ‘Never trust folklore, then. If this came out of the wall of that farmhouse, it’s a much more recent addition to the decor.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Science doesn’t lie, DC Cooper. Not within living memory, anyway. This skull is ten years old, at most. What I mean is — I’d estimate ten years since it was parted from its unfortunate owner.’

Cooper looked at the skull. ‘But Screaming Billy is supposed to go back to the eighteenth century, at least.’

The anthropologist shrugged. ‘This isn’t Billy, then, I’m afraid. I suggest we refer to him as Victim C.’